Abstract
The underlying thread of Decadence and Modernism has been the path from this world to another. Both Symbolists and Decadents contended with the apocalyptic and the idealistic, the dystopian and the fantastic. They navigated the anxieties and upheavals of the fin de siècle by reframing fundamental forms of knowledge and perception. This was a chaotic and messy undertaking that hinged on paradigmatic aesthetic and epistemological shifts. Symbolism was not wholly founded on idealism and its complex interactions with Decadence’s insistence on meaning derived from surfaces adds another dimension to modernism’s position in the 1890s. For both the Symbolists and the Decadents, the potential change was so great that it portended as much of an end as a beginning.
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Notes
- 1.
Konstantin Bal’mont, V bezbrezhnosti (Moscow: Levenson, 1895), 173.
- 2.
Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World [1893] (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 284. “[A]près la morte, toutes les substances dont le corps a été formé vont reconstituer d’autres êtres. La dissolution est le prélude d’un renouvellement et de la formation d’êtres nouveaux. L’analogie nous porte à croire qu’il en est de même dans le système cosmique. Rien ne peut être détruit.” Camille Flammarion, La Fin du Monde (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1894), 414.
- 3.
Flammarion , Omega: The Last Days of the World [1893], 268. “Celui qui aurait pu la voir, non point avec les yeux du corps qui ne perçoivent que les vibrations physiques, mais avec ceux de l’esprit qui savent percevoir les vibrations psychiques, celui-là aurait vu, emportées par cette ombre, deux petites flammes brillant l’une près de l’autre et mariées dans une même attraction, montant ensemble dans les cieux.” Flammarion, La Fin du Monde , 392–3.
- 4.
The Book of the Rhymer’s Club (London: Elkin Mathews, 1892), 17.
References
Bal’mont, Konstantin. 1895. V bezbrezhnosti. Moscow: Levenson.
Dowson, Ernest Christopher, Edwin John Ellis, G.A. Greene, Lionel Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Rhys, T.W. Rolleston, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, W.B. Yeats, Rhymers’ Club, J. Miller and Son, and E. Mathews. 1892. The Book of the Rhymer’s Club. London: Elkin Mathews.
Flammarion, Camille. 1894. La Fin du Monde. Paris: Ernest Flammarion.
———. 1999. Omega: The Last Days of the World [1893]. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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Stone, J. (2019). Conclusion: Fin-de-siècle Endings and Beginnings. In: Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34452-8_7
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